“Opinions differ,” said the Countess Krak. “Psychology, psychiatry, perversions beyond belief and a population that doesn’t even raise its voice when some nut like Rockecenter is ruining it. It’s not worth saving, Jettero. We’d better get a move on.”
“We’ve got time,” said Faht Bey. “It will take more than three months for them to make the voyages and hit the place.”
Heller shook his head. “How long ago did you stop the first freighter?”
“Oh, that’s been about four weeks now,” said Faht Bey.
“Then they will know for sure, within a couple weeks, that it didn’t come back. But it was Bolz that triggered it. You haven’t got three months. You may not even have five days.”
“What are we going to do?” said Faht Bey. “When they find out we stopped the drugs, they’ll slaughter us to a man and go right on with their invasion. We won’t have anything left to stand on even if they miss us.”
“Steady, steady,” said Heller. “I admit this is quite a problem. We’ve got to make sure Prahd’s patient is secure, we’ve got to move this base and we’ve got to safeguard this planet.”
“What?” said the Countess Krak. “Try to stand off the whole Apparatus fighting force? Please, Jettero, please. Don’t try to save this planet!”
“I’ll come up with something,” said Heller. “And make no mistake. Whatever else happens, I am going to make every effort to save this planet.”
“Oh,” said the Countess Krak in a voice of despair, looking at the set expression on Heller’s face.
None of them knew that none of their estimates were correct. Just four days short of arriving, an Apparatus Death Battalion was approaching with orders to find any hostile influence at the base and destroy it. That happened to include, at that instant, every Voltarian on Earth excepting only the Blixo, its crew, Captain Bolz and Oh Dear. This was no major invasion, not yet, but it could be the preliminary of mass slaughter. Lombar would go crazy for revenge against the planet for getting in the way of his ambitions.
The wings of death hovered over Earth.
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 3
In the coolness of the patio at the villa, Jettero Heller paced up and down. His mood of grimness did not match the tinkle of the fountain.
For weeks the Countess Krak had been after him to give some serious thought to their plight but had made no penetration in his easygoing attitude. She was learning something about trying to live with a personality like his: with peril a constant companion, a combat engineer took joy in life when he could and tended to shrug off dangers he considered minor. But once he conceived that something should be done about a situation, his dedication to getting it handled was a little awe-inspiring.
She had thought he would simply shrug and leave the planet to its fate. His carefree attitude did not carry over into his suddenly confronted tasks.
She sat on the fountain’s edge, hopeful that at any moment he would simply turn and say, “You’re right. It is too much for us. We’ll just put the Emperor in the tug and go someplace nobody ever heard of.”
He turned all right. But he didn’t say that. He said, “What do we know of Prince Mortiiy?”
She chilled. Calabar was writhing in the toils of raw, red war. What he inferred was even worse! But she said, managing a calm voice, “Nothing good, I’m afraid.”
“Good, bad, what does it matter?” said Heller. “I need information.”
He was asking her because she had lately been entertaining him with bits of Royal history she had read in the books Gris had left in her cell during her captivity. Suddenly she grasped an opportunity to discourage him from some mad course that could end in their destruction. He wouldn’t believe her unless he saw it himself in print. “Wait right there,” she said. “I’ll get the books.”
She returned in minutes with the latest supplement of the Compendium she could find. It was only a year old. She fluttered pages. There it was and she showed him, reading aloud:
MORTIIY, ex-Royal Prince. Proclaimed rebel.
Denied succession by Royal Proclamation.
Banished from Royal family.
Mortiiy, the youngest of three Royal sons of Cling the Lofty and the late Empress Fohl, was considered so distant from succession in his youth that he was permitted to follow his chosen career as an officer of the Fleet. Graduated from the Royal Academy rather than Protocol School at Palace City.
Served with the Fleet with no very notable distinction: three times excused courts-martial; striking and, in one instance, killing an officer superior in rank; not tried due to Royal lineage. Much given to brawling.
At the age of seventy, some ten years ago, Mortiiy’s oldest brother, heir to the throne, was killed in an air-limousine accident. As this left only one heir at Palace City, the Grand Council ordered Mortiiy to return from the Fleet and assume his princely duties, which he did.
For a time, Mortiiy behaved himself and supported his brother Glit, who had become the heir and of whom Mortiiy appeared very fond.
However, during a banquet Mortiiy, possibly stimulated with strong drink, took his father, Cling, to task on the outrageous accusation that Cling, not liking the eldest brother, had connived to have him murdered under the apparency of the air-limousine accident. Mortiiy advanced the weird theory that a technician had tampered with the machine. His father, Cling, despite this grave provocation, did yet speak to him further and demanded that if this was true, the technician be produced. Alas for Mortiiy, he had killed the offender in a rage of grief over his brother’s death.
Mortiiy was placed under house arrest for a considerable period, becoming very gloomy and surly, refusing to apologize.
When, five years ago, the heir to the throne, Glit, was found dead in his chambers after a short illness, two Lords approached the palace of Mortiiy to inform him that he was now the heir to the throne.
Instead of receiving the news graciously, Mortiiy flew into a rage, grievously injured both of them, raced to his father’s palace, shot down the guards and gained audience.
Mortiiy accused Cling before the entire court of being a murderer of his own children, renounced any succession to “a throne drenched in family blood,” fired a shot which narrowly missed Cling and then, killing several, seized an air-tank outside and made his escape.
Proclaimed now by Cling an outcast from the Royal family and with no right to succession to the throne, Mortiiy turned up at the Royal estates on Calabar. He subverted the guards and raised the standard of revolt. He was proclaimed a rebel by Cling.
His Majesty has been overheard to say that he would bestow vast estates upon the man who brings in the head of Mortiiy, so deep has the insult rankled.
Due to Cling’s advanced age and the length of his reign, efforts have been made to find and choose an heir apparent. But those clearly eligible in direct line have passed away. Succession must be chosen by a conclave of Lords and the Grand Council.
“So you see, Jettero,” said the Countess when she finished reading, “if you are thinking of taking His Majesty to Calabar and joining the rebel forces you’d seal his fate. Mortiiy would simply kill him.”
“Mortiiy is not a madman,” said Heller.
“He’ll do until one comes along,” said the Countess. “He is no longer in line for the succession. The whole fighting force of the Apparatus, as we heard when we were on Voltar, is engaged in a full-scale attack to wipe him out.”
Heller did not answer her. Instead he went to see Captain Bolz, who was sitting in his ship under heavy guard.
Bolz looked up the instant Heller appeared. “No sense talking to me,” he said. “I’m not going to join the (bleeped) Fleet and neither will my crew. We’re sensible people. We belong in the Apparatus and we are going to stay there!”
“I am sure,” said Heller, “that, with your smuggling, you find it far too profitable. But I’m not asking you to join. All I’m asking you to do is take back a cargo to Voltar.”
&nbs
p; “WHAT?” said Bolz. “So all this talk about no more drugs was just wind.”
“It will take several days to get your cargo here from New York, so if you will promise to sit quietly and give no trouble, you can go home with it and you won’t be in any trouble at all.”
“That’s fair,” said Bolz.
Heller went immediately to Faht Bey’s office. He put in a long-distance call to the president of IG Barben and you could almost see the sweat spurting back out of the phone when the man realized who he was talking to.
“Now hear me carefully,” said Heller. “I want a ton of tablets made. They will be composed of fifty percent antihistamine and fifty percent methadone. They will be shaped and packaged and marked as amphetamines and you will get them to the airport in Afyon, Turkey, by jet within four days.”
“A ton?”
“Correct,” said Heller. “See to it.”
The antihistamine, he knew from his studies, would give a semblance of reaction like amphetamines; the methadone would counteract heroin. If Lombar ran out of drugs, let the Lords withdraw more easily with that. He doubted anyone would detect the difference. It bought time.
He wrote a dispatch to Bolz telling him to be on the lookout for it, load it up when it came and go home. And he wrote the dispatch with an ink that would fade to nothing in a couple of days.
He found Faht Bey. “How many freighters do you have that will operate?”
“We got the old ones running. Two more have been stopped here. Five freighters.”
“Good. That’s enough. Disassemble the base and load it and all personnel. Break your neck and be ready to go as soon as possible.”
“It will take days,” said Faht Bey.
“I hope not,” said Heller. “If we do this right and we are quick, we can save this planet.”
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 4
There seemed, suddenly, to be a thousand details to what had looked like a simple undertaking. Family connections who had been unaware of extraterrestrial husbands and domestic connections who had never known who their employers really were had to be cared for somehow, at least decently set up in life. Faht Bey remarked that the Apparatus would simply have killed them and then hastily said he was just commenting, when he saw Heller’s look.
The New York office had to be shut down and its personnel hauled back.
Heller found out from Prahd that there was now a lot of trained Earth staff, including doctors, and that made up Heller’s mind. He phoned Mudur Zengin at the Piastre National Bank.
“Make up papers,” Heller said, “transferring amounts which have been scheduled for ‘company maintenance, Afyon’ over to ‘hospital and disease-eradication use.’ Make them up so they stay in effect pending any cancellation from me.”
“That’s an awful lot of money for health,” said Zengin.
“We’re earmarking a good chunk of it for drug rehabilitation,” said Heller.
“That’s a big job,” said Zengin.
“Right. Maybe we can undo some of the damage that’s been done. Would it be asking too much to fly the papers down here?”
“Not at all,” said Zengin. “I’ll come myself.”
Krak got hold of Heller. “That Russian spy colonel is still sitting there in his cell. You were holding him in case they needed more when they tried Gris. Remember?”
“Well, he hasn’t got a country anymore,” said Heller. “He can’t be very dangerous. Put a hypnohelmet on him and suppress his memory of the base and let him go.”
“It’s not that simple,” said the Countess. “There’s the two little boys he corrupted. They’re caving in, nobody can do a thing with them. I had an idea. France has been exporting an awful lot of drugs.”
“What’s that got to do with Colonel Gaylov?” said Heller. “He was also exporting heroin. From here. To keep the international KGB network running.”
“Well, those that commit crimes like that,” said the Countess Krak, “will often turn completely around and campaign against such deeds. What I want to do is send Colonel Gaylov to France with the two little boys.”
“You must be awfully mad at France. They’d corrupt the whole nation!”
“No, I don’t think so,” said the Countess. “You see, I’ve been talking to the colonel and he’s absolutely spinning with the glory of it.”
“Of what?”
“To show up in France and use the old KGB network to convince everybody he’s the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. I didn’t even touch the helmet. He’s sure he can be the greatest Joan of Arc that ever lived!”
Heller gave her a sizable draft on the Grabbe-Manhattan Bank in Paris, to be paid out to Gaylov, month by month for years.
When she put him and the two boys on the plane the following morning, there was a holy gleam in ex-Utanc’s eye. Standing there in a silver traveling gown, he/she said, “You are an angel and I bless the day I met you. I can in truth say that I was visited by the Lord of Hosts on high. France is about to become the holiest and most drugless place on Earth.” And they were gone.
Handling Babe was not quite as happy an occasion for Heller.
He got her on the phone and said, “Mrs. Corleone, I’m terribly sorry to have to cancel out on the wedding you had planned for the cathedral next month.”
Babe, startled, said, “She’s left you?”
“Oh, no,” said Heller. “It’s just that things got pretty urgent.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going to pull a fast justice of the peace before those nine months and the stork catches up with you. Well, all right, son, Mama understands. Just don’t forget to name the baby Giuseppe after ‘Holy Joe’ if it’s a boy, or Alma Maria after me if it’s a girl. And get that beautiful countess into bed and resting as soon as you’re hitched and you leave her alone until she delivers. You hear me now, Jerome, and don’t interrupt. You’re not doing me out of a grandchild, do you hear?”
“Yes, Mrs. Corleone.”
“And can this ‘Mrs. Corleone’ stuff. You can’t soft-soap your own mother. Get that girl to the justice of the peace quick, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, then. And come back when the coast is clear and she can be seen in public again. You’re a dear boy, Jerome, but you sure as hell take a lot of guidance. Keep your nose clean, kid.” There was an audible sniff. “I got to run off now, something’s in my eyes. Bye-bye, son.”
Heller’s own eyes, as he hung up, were wet. He doubted that he would ever see her again.
PART SEVENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 5
Regulations required that an installation on a foreign planet could not be abandoned without being destroyed. There were many reasons for this: included amongst them was the misuse of such a base for piracy and smuggling.
Jettero Heller, as a competent combat engineer, did a competent job of setting it up. He used metal-disintegrator mines. These, inserted near connection boxes and along conduits, would cause an atomic shift of heavier metals to silica: with a surge of enormous heat from the converted atoms, every piece of metal that comprised the hangar area would become sand. This meant that the tension-beam boxes would go and the twist and stresses in the rocks that had been restrained through a thousand earthquakes would no longer be braked. The result would be a furious flash of fire and then a wall collapse. It would simply appear that an earthquake had caused the mountain to collapse into an unsuspected fissure.
He attached the fuses to a central firing box and this he triggered to a remote control.
“Bolz,” he said to the captain of the Blixo, “I am going to have to trust you. You will not join the Fleet. Your cargo will not arrive until the day after we are gone. When you have loaded and exited spaceward, your last act must be to push this button.” And he gave him the very small box.
“What will happen?” said Bolz.
“Well, don’t experiment,” said Heller. “The Blixo had better be up there a couple miles when you do it. Every p
iece of metal in this hangar will disintegrate. A human body contains a lot of iron and anybody standing around will also become sand. So don’t leave anybody in here.”
Bolz looked at the remote. “It doesn’t have a safety catch.”
“Why should it?” said Heller. “You’ll find it pretty hard to push. It won’t go off by accident. But my order to you is don’t delay in leaving here. And when you do, push it.”
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